Quay

Our last hurrah for Good Food Month 2008! And we saved the best for last. Quay restaurant this year took out every major award available: The Restaurant & Catering Industry’s 2008 National Awards for Excellence Restaurant of the Year, The SMH Good Food Guide 2009 Restaurant of the Year, and Australian Gourmet Traveller’s Restaurant of the Year 2009.

Friday was hot. Those of you in Sydney know it was really hot: 36°-38°. After a brief sojourn through The Rocks Markets, where I picked up some beautiful Australian grown garlic (supermarket garlic at the moment is mostly Mexican), we walked over to the Overseas Passenger Terminal.

We were very happy to get inside this cool, and water-themed restaurant. We would have been happy anywhere in this heat! We were seated quickly, at the back of the restaurant, overlooking the Harbour Bridge. If this is the worst seat in the house, it sure is good!

The blinds were drawn against the heat, and I felt sorry for those out on the balcony, as it would have been unrelenting out there.

As with all Let’s Do Lunch deals, we were getting the set meal of a main, a glass of wine and tea or coffee. The difference at Quay was the luxeness of the amuse bouche: trout tartare, roe and cauliflower puree:

Like many other restaurants, Quay was offering a fish main as part of it’s deal: roasted leather jacket with white asparagus, summer herbs and lemon confit dressing.

A lovely summery dish, the lemon confit dressing set the whole dish off. We ordered the mixed leaf salad and avoided the mash as we were angling for dessert. We also avoided the red wine and settled on the pinot grigio. Due to the heat we were knocking back the water fairly quickly too.

The first thing I note is the gorgeous flatware, big heavy and reminiscent of Georg Jensen…

Ah, now for me, the main attraction: The 8 Texture Chocolate Cake
I’d read about this dessert many times, and was terribly excited about finally getting to experience it. The young waiter brought over a a heavily leaden tray. I was somewhat confused by the small copper pot that was also on the tray, but soon all was revealed…he put the plate with the cake in front of me, then proceeded to stir molten chocolate in the pot and pour it on top of the cake! Chocolate on chocolate! It doesn’t get much better!

Dessert at Quay is expensive. But if you love chocolate, you’ll think that this is worth every penny! Now i hate to quibble, but technically, was it a cake? It seemed more like mousse to me? But is there an actual definition? In any case, it was a symphony of chocolate on a beautiful hazelnut biscuit base…Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t a dessert or in fact, a meal, that left us feeling sickly, over full or sleepy.

@ LorraineE Well, that’s why I asked what actually constitutes a cake, as there seemed to me to be just 3 textures? Two different weights of mousse and then the hazelnut biscuit, oh make that four if you include the thick chocolate sauce plopped on top!